Fracking: evil – or just another heavy industry?

Editor's note: This is the second part of a three-part series. The first part can be read here.

The recent State Department report that appears to signal coming U.S. approval of the Keystone XL pipeline from oil fields in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast stunned many environmentalists. For years, they’d described the pipeline as a gigantic catastrophe waiting to happen, not just one long oil pipeline in a world with plenty of oil pipelines. Never leaving their green bubble, they were amazed that the administration of a president they largely backed could implicitly dismiss their worst fears as alarmism.

Now – with the state of California just beginning a debate over whether it should exploit its huge reserves of shale oil with a newly improved form of drilling known as hydraulic fracturing – environmentalists are once again warning of apocalyptic results. But what few seem to understand, and what the media have rarely emphasized, is that the Obama administration dismisses their alarmism about “fracking” – just as it did with Keystone XL.

The same administration that is widely considered the most aggressive in environmental regulation of any in U.S. history has a documented record of agreeing with the long-standing conventional wisdom about fracking among Democratic and Republican administrations and regulators alike. That view: The process poses the same potential pollution risks as many heavy industries, but those risks can be controlled and minimized with proper oversight.

In denouncing fracking, critics invent straw men and pretend they are noble fighters wielding irrefutable facts against corporate greedheads. But in depicting fracking as evil, they never admit their real argument is with the Obama administration.

In hydraulic fracturing, high-powered streams of water laced with small amounts of sand and chemicals are aimed at underground rock formations that block access to oil and natural gas reserves. Pioneered by Halliburton in the late 1940s, fracking was used in 1 million wells for the next 60 years in the U.S. without garnering much attention.

In recent years, however, information technology and the use of horizontal drilling has transformed fracking from a modestly effective process into an extremely cost-effective method of reaching previously inaccessible oil and natural gas reserves. Vast computational power allows drillers to take the equivalent of MRIs of immense underground areas, allowing for much more precise use of water blasting.

The process keeps getting more precise, using increasingly less water (with recycling rates at 70 percent and going higher), while lessening collateral effects on underground rock formations that aren’t harboring energy reserves.

After decades of silence, environmentalists now argue that this underground drilling poses vast risks to the underground water table that provides much of the water Americans consume.

But fracking occurs a mile or deeper beneath the surface. Water tables are a few hundred feet below the surface, or less. There is a solid rock buffer separating drilling areas from groundwater aquifers.

What’s more, wells are built of steel and concrete and cemented in place – meaning their construction adds another buffer between energy production and water tables.